What happens at Pentonville, and what takes place at Millbank, is done under the same eye, under the same legislative supervision. The two “great experiments” of iron and feather-bed prison reform are worked out by the same power. The despots of Russia, Austria, and China, are at least consistent. They have not carried on opposite systems—one of extreme severity, and another of superlative ‘coddling.’ In no other country but this does Justice—blind as she is—administer cocoa and condign misery to the same degree of crime with the same hand. We have thrown these facts together, merely to awaken attention to them. We purposely abstain from suggestive comment. We know that the subject of reformatory punishment is fraught with difficulties, to conquer which all the “great experiments” have been tried. But they have only been “great” because of their great expense and their great failure; and when the failure is incontestable—proved beyond doubt by the direst results,—should they not be abandoned, and something else tried, instead of being made an absolute matter of faith, and a test to which certain county magistrates, whom we could name, bring every man who is unhappy enough to be within their power? The cause of it is plainly and constantly presented at the bar of every Police Court and in the dock of every Sessions House. It has resulted from an utter misapprehension of means to end, and a lofty disregard of the good old adage, “prevention is better than cure.” Although it has been daily observed that ignorance—moral more than intellectual—ignorance has been the forerunner of all juvenile crime, we have never tried any very great experiment upon _that_. On the contrary, we spend hundreds of thousands every year to effect the manifest impossibility of re-forming what has never been formed. We have tried every shade of system but the right. Ingenuity has been on the rack to invent every sort of reformatory, from the iron rule of Millbank, to the affectionate fattening at Pentonville—except one, and that happens to be the right one. Punishment has occupied all our thoughts,—training, none. We condemn young criminals for not knowing certain moralities which we have not taught them, and—by herding them with accomplished professors of dishonesty in transit jails—punish them for immoralities which have been there taught them. Instances of this can be adduced in so large a proportion as to amount to a rule; to which the appearance of instructed juvenile criminals at the tribunals is the exception. Two or three glaring cases occurred only the past month. We select one as reported in the “Globe” newspaper of Tuesday, May 7:—